Only a third of Hongkongers realise they have a vote in the new "super seats" in next month's Legislative Council election, a survey has found.

Pundits warned that a lack of government publicity could affect the result of the election for the five super seats, in which 3.2 million voters who do not hold a vote in any other functional constituency are eligible to cast ballots.

Filling midterm vacancies in legislatures with the next-in-line candidate from the former representative's party in countries which use proportional representation system can prevent political assassinations, an academic says.

The government's controversial proposal to fill midterm vacancies in the Legislative Council by installing the next-best-placed candidate would serve the intended purpose: preventing lawmakers from claiming a by-election to be a referendum.

But it may lead to some unintended consequences, and even tricky scenarios that officials may not have thought through.

The government has a plan to stop lawmakers using by-elections to stage 'referendums' - by scrapping by-elections in geographical constituencies.

In a proposal announced yesterday, a vacant seat in the Legislative Council arising from the resignation or death of a legislator would be filled by the next best placed candidate at the previous election.

You can always rely on the Americans to do the right thing, Winston Churchill was famously quoted as saying, once they have exhausted every other possibility. On this premise, we might well award Secretary for Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Stephen Lam Sui-lung honorary American citizenship.

After four meetings and one workshop, the Commission on Strategic Development's task group on constitutional development has wound up without reaching any definitive conclusions. Task group members might not have grown any wiser about the blueprint for our democratic development in the next 12 years or so, but one thing is certain.

For bad losers, the most convenient target is the system. In the Legislative Council election, the Democratic Party suffered quite a setback, and has been demoted from being the biggest party in Legco to number three. As is to be expected, Democrats quickly found a culprit: the voting scheme.

Six years after the introduction of proportional representation voting in Hong Kong, the system is still a mystery to many voters, none more than to first-timers. While many inexperienced young voters have firm opinions on the importance of voting, and how and why they will vote in the Legislative Council elections on September 12, they do not have a clue how the system works.

Danny Gittings, with his usual bias ('Inside Track' column, Sunday Morning Post, August 27), is quite wrong to say that introducing proportional representation was gerrymandering. If he knows anything about political systems, he must be aware that the first-past-the-post system has long been recognised as unfair, both to voters and political parties.